Context N°16
by Nicholas Wadley
There cannot be many philosopher-novelists who started their careers as visual artists. But it was part of Stefan Themerson’s philosophy to defy categories. He made films; he ran a publishing house. As well as his nine novels, he wrote stories for children, poems, a play, an opera, and essays on philosophy, language, logic, literature, science, art, film, and typography. Until his death in September 1988, he also spent spare moments making drawings: abstract, colored configurations in which lines, points, and planes are bent into paradox, satirizing their own logic. The sum of this prodigal diet of interrelated activities reveals itself now as concentration, justifying his fundamental belief that the effect of respecting boundaries or classifications—whether cultural, professional or political—is at least inhibiting, and usually negative.
The first experience to fire his imagination was discovering the magic of the camera. Drifting out of his studies in physics and architecture in the late 1920s in Warsaw, he started to improvise with photograms, collages, and various combinations of the two. Subsequently, he made seven experimental films—five in Warsaw and two in London—in collaboration with his wife, the painter Franciszka Themerson (who also died in 1988, two months before him).
Themerson later wrote that these films were a form of collage, free of symbolism. He recalled Moholy Nagy’s reaction to the most ambitious of them, Europa, when he saw it in London in 1936. Nagy called it “a sophisticated film,” about which Themerson said:
I was too young then to tell him that he was wrong. That the film was primitive. . . . Primitive people would have taken it as it was meant to be taken. Would have seen it as it was shown. Without further inter-polation.
He referred to his first films as “photograms in motion” and he likened their syntax both to the concentration of poems and to the rhythmical patterns of music. He insisted on their autonomy:
It is something unique.
It is a photogram.
It doesn’t represent anything.
It doesn’t abstract from anything.
It is just what it is.
It is reality itself.
Four of the five Warsaw films did not survive the war. And none of those that did survive allows us close enough to the free, lyrical attributes that he prized so much in the medium, to properly evaluate his achievement as a filmmaker. Adventures of a Good Citizen (1937, Warsaw), while it is a shrewd satirical fantasy, full of autograph poetic qualities and morals, is nevertheless uncharacteristic of his Polish films as he described them. Unlike the lost films, it has a clear narrative sequence and it has a spoken soundtrack.
Of the two films that the Themersons made together in London, Calling Mr Smith (1943) is an explicit protest—moral, not nationalistic—against the systematic destruction of Polish culture by the Nazis (outspoken enough to be refused by the British censor). The Eye and the Ear (1944) is an imaginative improvisation with abstract forms, representing the interaction of musical sounds.
Of all their films, Themerson saw Europa (1932) as their major achievement. It was a visualization of Anatol Stern’s futurist poem and was highly praised by Stern himself. The few frames that survive can only hint at the fluid visual sequences that he described. However, the qualities that he valued in film as a medium, especially the free association of images that refer to nothing outside themselves, are clearly recognizable in most of his work as a writer. The initiative behind his concern with semantics was to free words of confusing sentimental or literary references, and, as with the photograms, to expose their own incontrovertible identity. The autograph character of his later novels is of several simultaneous currents of narrative and thought that may appear only obliquely related and that, together, create their own cumulative reality and sense. His whole œuvre as a writer is like that: a continuous collage, its parts distinct but full of allusive echoes and repetitions.
In the winter of 1937–38, the Themersons moved from Warsaw to Paris, intending to live and work there. “There was no sense of escaping from Warsaw,” Stefan told me, “I simply knew I had to be in Paris.” It was “a sort of Mecca”; one which realized all of his expectations. But his plans were disrupted by the course of the war, and by 1942 he found himself in London, where he and Franciszka spent the rest of their lives.
Themerson wrote in the three languages of the countries in which he successively found himself. That the majority of his writing was in English is a matter of the vagaries of history. When asked why he chose to write in English, he replied that the language chose him. During the war he experienced the loss, disorientation, and cultural negation that was the lot of his generation. As well as his first four films, the (Polish) manuscript of his first novel also disappeared. But his reaction to the force of events was more positive than simply stoical. He upheld unequivocally a concept of the writer carrying his culture with him and he believed creeds of nationalism and patriotism to be actively dangerous:
Writers are never, writers are nowhere in exile, for they carry within themselves their own kingdom, or republic, or city of refuge, or whatever it is that they carry within themselves. And at the same time, every writer, ever, everywhere, is in exile, because he is squeezed out of the kingdom, or republic, or city, or whatever it is that squeezes itself dry.
As a teenager in his native town of Plock, he already saw English and French literature as major elements of his indigenous cultural world. Nevertheless, up to a point, his writing in each of the three languages—Polish, French, English—appears to have different characteristics or points of focus. Apart from articles, principally about film, most of his pre-war Polish writing consists of stories for children. In France he wrote poems and the prose-poems, Croquis dans les ténèbres, and he mused to me once about how different his writing might have been had he stayed in Paris: might it have remained as lyrical as the Croquis? There is no doubt that much of the imagery of the Croquis appears quite distinct from his English writing, more oblique and submerged. In Barbara Wright’s translation, the poetic mirror-image of poet and angel on each side of the window-pane, with its evocative inversions of interior and exterior, of the emptiness of matter and the “hardness” of abstraction, is a case in point. The angel looks “outside from the exterior,” a paradox he emphasized typographically. Both the poet and the angel lose their sense of balance as they approach the world of the other. Even in the poems written in England, we seldom find this sort of imagery, and the poems are only a small part of his English œuvre. It was in London that he embarked upon his theoretical writings on philosophy and language.
In other respects, these apparent differences of place are misleading. The early “English” novels (Bayamus, Professor Mmaa, Cardinal Pölätüo) were written originally in Polish, and Bayamus was first published in installments in Nowa Polska, 1946. They read now as the bedrock of his English writing and there is a remarkable homogeneity—in meaning as well as content—throughout his œuvre, whatever the medium or language.
He was absorbed by language, fastidious as well as idiosyncratic in its usage. His meticulous and sometimes eccentric use of punctuation, for instance, often plays an important role in the repetitive structures of his writing. He wrote extensively on aesthetics, semantics, and typography. His writing on the art of Kurt Schwitters is essentially about meaning contained in the uses of language, as is his revealing essay Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms (1968). Set beside such concerns, the question of the language in which he wrote appears a secondary issue. And he almost never pursued his interests in language for their own sake. The short novel Wooff Wooff, or Who Killed Richard Wagner? (1951) might appear at first reading like a semantic diversion, but in reality is as cautionary a tale as anything he wrote. Elsewhere, in discussing the value of linguistic philosophy, he went out of his way to dissociate himself from those obsessed with language per se. He wrote, of “the academic Goddess of Ethics,” that
she is only interested in herself. I am interested in ethical behaviour, but she is interested in ethical terminology. For the last eighty years she’s been sharpening her linguistic tools, but she thinks it would be unladylike to use them.
He came to feel at home with the English language remarkably quickly. He took English lessons while stranded in France, 1940–42, and again when he arrived in London, and in 1946 he published his first article in English, in Polemic. He often spoke of the dual properties peculiar to English: its exactness and its crystalline shades of meaning—the latter a quality that he alternately relished and mistrusted.
Feeling at home with England and reading its social codes was another matter. He once talked to me about cultural differences between Poland, France, and England:
In Poland when you met someone, their instinct was to doubt your values or worth. You had to prove them. Friendships were hard-won. In Paris, you were accepted as a friend until and unless you did something to lose that status. In London, of course, it’s different, neither one nor the other. There’s this objectivity and you sometimes don’t find out if you are a friend until long afterwards.
He was to remain as detached from the British literary establishment as when he arrived. He did not fit into established groups; he was not even an émigré academic. As Anthony Burgess once complained, “there’s a strange idea in this country that you can’t be both a composer and a writer,” and Themerson was both of these things and others besides. But these were circumstances he observed with sardonic amusement. He valued his independence and anyway, in art as in life, he despised synthetic categories. During the 1950s and 1960s, he submitted a number of poems to the Times Literary Supplement but none were accepted. To prove a hunch to himself, he sent to the editor yet another poem, “My childhood . . . ,” as a translation, over the signature Tomasz Woydyslawski. It was published (on 5 March 1964)—and identified as Themerson’s work by friends.
It was a wish for independence as much as anything else that motivated the Themersons’ decision in 1948 to found their own publishing house in Maida Vale, the Gaberbocchus Press: to be free to publish what they wanted and in what form they wanted. The earlier Gaberbocchus books were printed at their home on Randolph Avenue. Subsequently, they acquired premises on Formosa Street and at that point, the Themersons were joined by two other directors, Barbara Wright and Gwen Barnard. The full list of Gaberbocchus titles demonstrates the imaginative character of their publications, including Barbara Wright’s first English translations of Jarry, Queneau, Pol-Dives, and others. What a list cannot do is express the originality of format, typography, and design that rapidly became a Gaberbocchus hallmark. Franciszka Themerson was the art director and she illustrated many of the books, but they worked together in the same close collaboration as on their films, to produce what they described as “best-lookers” rather than best-sellers. Asked in a questionnaire what were the Press’s main strength and weakness, Themerson gave the same answer to each question: “refusal to conform.” The “unclassifiability” of Gaberbocchus Press expresses the essential Stefan Themerson.
As an offshoot of the Press, the Gaberbocchus Common Room was opened on Formosa Street, to provide “a congenial place where artists and scientists and people interested in science and art can meet and exchange thoughts.” Themerson’s concern was again with the dissolution of obsolete boundaries. In 1946, he had edited five issues of Nowa Polska on “Literature, Art and Science in England” and by the later 1950s, had become increasingly interested in exposing the common philosophies of art and science. He corresponded at the time with C. P. Snow. For two years, from 1957 to 1959, the Common Room was a vital, informal weekly forum with a membership of more than a hundred. The members were addressed by writers, painters, poets, actors, scientists, musicians, filmmakers, and philosophers. There were talks on physics, metaphysics, and pataphysics; readings of Jarry, Shakespeare, Beckett, Strindberg, Queneau, and Schwitters; performances of modern music and scientific film. Among other contributors, Sean Connery and Bernard Bresslaw read O’Neill; Dudley Moore accompanied Michael Horovitz’s poetry reading; Konni Zilliacus spoke on the immorality of nuclear weapons. The project was only reluctantly abandoned because it consumed too much working time. In such a catalog lies at least part of the reason why, as a writer and publisher, Themerson was not embraced by the establishment.
In the 1940s and 1950s, his circle of significant friends included writers, artists, scientists and philosophers, some of whom he had known in Warsaw or Paris. He enjoyed close friendships with Kurt Schwitters and Jankel Adler, both of whom he published. In 1950 Bertrand Russell wrote in warm praise of Bayamus (1949), “nearly as mad as the world.” Their long correspondence and exchange of manuscripts, bantering criticism and thoughts on philosophy and the world at large began early in 1952 and continued until Russell’s death. The original draft of factor T (1956) was written as a long letter to Russell. Russell wrote the preface to Professor Mmaa’s Lecture (1953) and Gaberbocchus published Russell’s Good Citizen’s Alphabet (1953) and History of the World in Epitome (1962), both with Franciszka Themerson’s illustrations which, Russell said, “heighten all the points I most wanted made.”
As well as becoming deeply involved in Russell’s principles and methods as a philosopher, Themerson appears to have drawn strength from his scale of human values. Although he later felt reservations about Russell’s total commitment to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—it was too much like one of the burning “aims” by which Themerson felt the native instincts of individuals were led astray—he shared Russell’s doubts about faith in a good society. “A good society” inspired less hope for the future than “good people.”
Russell’s supportive appreciation also seems to have encouraged Themerson’s pursuit of semantics as a major interest. But, if any single factor bore significant influence upon this area of his activity as a writer, it was the earlier encounter with Kurt Schwitters, in wartime London. Themerson heard Schwitters perform his sound-poems on several occasions and was the first to publish Schwitters’s English writing. He gave many talks on Schwitters—the earliest in the Gaberbocchus Common Room in the 1950s—and his notes for these talks include his most sensitive and eloquent thoughts on anyone else’s work. As well as his justly celebrated essay Kurt Schwitters in England (1958), he published “Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart” (1967) and Pin (1962), the polemical manifesto of new poetry that Schwitters was compiling with Raoul Hausmann shortly before his death in 1947. The choice of title for Themerson’s “Semantic Sonata” (written 1949–50; published in factor T, 1956) may be seen as some sort of homage to Schwitters’s Ursonata. Furthermore, the initiative behind his concept of “Semantic Poetry” sprang from a polemical wish to purify language that strikes very comparable attitudes to those advanced in Pin. In Bayamus, the narrator explains to the audience at the Theatre of Semantic Poetry, “each of the S.P. words should have one and only one meaning.” In a radio talk in Warsaw, 1964, Themerson elaborated:
Semantic Poetry doesn’t arrange verses into bunches of flowers. It bares a poem and shows the reality behind it. There is no room for hypnosis in a semantic poem.
And finally, in introductory notes for a reading of the 1970s, which are themselves full of bravura verbal bouquets, he wrote more on his rebellion against “linguistic harmonics.”
I wanted to strip words of their associations, to cut their links with the past. This rebellion was anti-romantic and anti-ecstatic. It was directed both against political rhetoricians and against Joycean avant-coureurs. Against associational thickets of Eliot and the verboidal surrealisms of History. I wanted to disinfect words, scrub them right to the very bone of their dictionary definitions. That was how—somewhat ferociously and sardonically—I invented Semantic Poetry. It was meant to be funny. Both serious & funny. It became the subject of my novel Bayamus.
In some respects it is inappropriate to consider Themerson’s novels separately, so closely is all of his writing interrelated. There are several instances in which Themerson brought together plots and structures from very different writings to create a new work. The opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (1972, written 1954–60) was born from the text of Semantic Divertissements (1962, written 1949–50) and a paragraph in factor T.
He viewed the novel as one of several vehicles available for his current concerns. In 1952, having read the manuscript of Cardinal Pölätüo (1961), Russell wrote to Themerson suggesting alterations, because “I think you have tried to combine into one book things which do not readily fit together.” But Themerson never saw this as a problem, and in any case he saw most of his novels as each having its own distinct philosophical or linguistic subject. He deliberately chose to treat philosophical subjects in novels because of the freedom that the genre offers:
Fiction allows you to do things that history or treatises can’t—especially in the sense that you can rescue or retrieve meanings that are lost from generation to generation. These time barriers are harder to cross than geographical barriers.
He was genuinely concerned that the ideas of any one time should not be lost to another generation of readers. (He discussed the publishing policy of Gaberbocchus in these terms.) Themerson’s natural ability to treat matters of gravity with apparent levity comes to the fore in the allusive style of his novels. (As one reviewer saw it, “Death and philosophy have rarely been so much fun.”)
Of the longer novels, Professor Mmaa’s Lecture is the earliest. The original Polish version was mostly written at the same time as Croquis dans les ténèbres, from 1941 to 1942 during the eighteen months or so that he was stranded in Voiron, in the “free zone” of France, and then finished in Scotland in 1943. In his preface to the book, Russell likens its form of satirical allegory to Swift. The follies of human conduct are observed with guileless candor by a society of sightless termites. They observe by their highly developed sense of smell and they learn through their digestive systems. It is an exposé of human conformism in face of “progress” and absolute government.
Themerson wrote Bayamus (the first novel to be published, in 1949) to launch his invention of Semantic Poetry. The poet-narrator is aided and abetted in propagating his new art by the mercurial, three-legged Bayamus, with all the fugitive wisdom of a Shakespearian fool.
In the later long novels like Tom Harris (1967), The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), and Hobson’s Island (1988), he approached the genre differently, flirting openly with the form of the modern thriller. (He read a lot of detective fiction and had particular respect for Chandler.) Within that seductive idiom, he played many concurrent games. Usually there is a large cast of characters:
Sometimes it is like a party. Many people meet each other there. No special reason why they should meet, but just to give a picture of life. Otherwise, it seems somehow—provincial.
The characters bring with them an equally large cast of ideas, arguing, and discussing, as at a party, whatever concerns them (him). Burning political issues mingle with discussions of social mores, realities with dreams, the dramatic with the mundane. There is a lot of sensible pragmatism. “If a young man becomes depressed by reading Samuel Beckett,” one character declares, “that very fact proves that he’s perfectly sane.” Faced with the implausibly spectacular circumstances of the early plot of Hobson’s Island, a perplexed secretary at the Vatican asks over the phone, “please tell me straight: is this meant to be a parable or is it on the level?”
The Mystery of the Sardine and Hobson’s Island form, with Cardinal Pölätüo and General Piesc (1976), a sort of family saga, their plots enacted by successive generations, with several characters reappearing. In the cast of The Mystery of the Sardine, General Piesc—who does not in person appear in the novel because he is dead—is listed as “absent.”
Themerson wrote Hobson’s Island with the knowledge that it would be his last book and it is not difficult to read it as a final work. In turn, it is the most spectacularly dramatic and the most introspective of all of his novels. The isolated simplicity of life of the Hobson’s islanders is set on a collision course with the overwrought values and conduct of the outside world. The conclusion is a tour de force, both tragic and contemplative. At the end, the narrator (Scan D’Earth) levitates above the island, surveying those actors that survive from the theatre of a life’s work.
For all the diverse riches of their discourse in mortal and immortal values, there is nothing in these later novels without a calculated role in their elaborate jigsaws of logic, paradox, and morality. Extravagant and comic images always refresh meaning and are crafted into the structure as meticulously as the elegant clarity of the language. The lurking love of paradox is only allowed to run loose in an occasional “wild card” character. One of the things Themerson enjoyed in detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s was their characteristically irrational element, the character from nowhere. The surreal role of the man from Mars in The Mystery of the Sardine or the enigma of Nemo in Hobson’s Island are comparable devices.
The moral principles that underlie all of Themerson’s work were first clearly set out in the essay factor T. This essay exposes the “Tragic factor”—a fatal flaw in the human condition. It is the product of a discrepancy between man’s Dislikes (D) and his Needs (N). Themerson’s first analogy is about members of a tribe and their Need and Dislike for tomatoes. They have a vital, biological Need of tomatoes as their only local source of vitamin C. However, since the eating of tomatoes is forbidden by their religion, the tribesmen have developed an equally vital Dislike of the taste. Hence, “factor T.”
Later on, he examines the example of “killing”:
I do not know about weasels, but it is difficult to imagine two anthropoid apes that would kill each other, or steal from each other, unless they happened to be unanimous. They have to be unanimous in their desire for one and the same female, or for one and the same coconut, if they are to fight. And even then their dislike for killing and stealing must be great if they feel compelled (as soon as they develop a language) to invent some lofty reasons for this unpleasant behaviour, and thus build philosophical systems, religions and police forces.
We invent our god to exculpate us when we find it necessary to perform the unpleasant act of killing those who invent their god when they find it necessary to perform the unpleasant task of killing us. And we invented the police force, not only to prevent others from killing us when they find it necessary, but also to force ourselves to kill the others whenever this act, which we dislike, is found necessary for us.
There is a tragic discrepancy between our dislike of killing and the necessity of doing so. I call that discrepancy factor T, and it seems to me neither virtuous nor wise to ignore it.
And again:
Certain vital needs of our guts (N) cannot be satisfied without affecting our nervous system in a certain way (D). The resulting state of perplexity (T) is basically unavoidable.
He successively investigates the inability of philosophy, religion, and science to deal with the problem, suggesting at one point:
It seems to me a pity that rational ethics underestimates our need to know that our original Tragedy is at least recognised. Rational ethics concentrates either on Dislike or on Necessity, but refuses to face the Tragedy that is imbedded in the situation. And this is why we are compelled to think rational speculation utopian or sentimental when it emphasises Dislike; materialistic or fascist when it emphasises Necessity; opportunist when it switches from one to the other; hypocritical when it preaches D and kills for its N, and donnish when it studies our N and leaves D to believers.
Just as elsewhere he suggests that the novelist may have more to say on morality than the computer scientist, so here he proposes literature as the only fruitful field of research into the tragic dilemma, because without it “we shall never know what it is that has been built up . . . in our brains.”
He concludes:
I propose to call “Man” anything (a beast, a plant, or a machine) whose nervous system is split into two parts so that one part prompts it to perform actions leading to the satisfaction of its primary needs while the other part restrains it from performing such actions whenever they are (as they invariably are) to the detriment of other organisms—thus producing a neural tension which results in its building gothic cathedrals, chinese pagodas, houses of parliament, bull rings, Royal Societies, revolutions, counter-revolutions, heavenly kingdoms, Stratford-on-Avons, in short, anything uneatable and uninhabitable, even if it doesn’t amount to more than an aspirin tablet of hypocrisy.
I propose not to call “Man” things (whatever their anatomy) whose nervous systems, free of the split, allows them to do without hesitation the necessary pillage in the woods of the world.
The study of the split is a pleasure. Yet, if our scientific research goes so far as to make us able to meddle with it, the pleasure will become a danger. Because, if the split is what makes a thing a “Man,” then mending it would be synonymous with the extinction of human kind.
Towards the end of his life, Themerson returned to the subject in another essay, The Chair of Decency, given as the Huizinga Lecture at the University of Leyden, 1981. Using a generous repertoire of allegory and fable, he set out a sustained argument for a return to basic human values. He suggests that the self-conscious aims and missions of the modern world have deluded us into losing sight of the intuitive decent values in our behavior towards each other that we are born with. Aims are cultural, he says, but the proper Means are biological. The highest of our natural human instincts have been discarded in the misguided and blinkered pursuit of beliefs and causes:
no Aim is so exalted that it be worth a heartbeat more than Decency of Means. Because, when all is said and done, Decency of Means is the Aim of aims.
Looking backwards from this declamatory manifesto of his philosophy, we may see different faces of the same thought in almost everything else he wrote. The Polish stories for children address themselves to questioning the real world—the practical experience of daily life, human values, the ambiguities of language—with no suspicion of condescension or cultural improvement. The lyrical parable of the film Adventures of a Good Citizen champions the liberating experience of walking backwards, in face of conventional prejudice.
The ironic meaning of Themerson’s 1949 version of Aesop’s The Eagle and the Fox was so coolly stated that it went unobserved by any reviewer. After the original rendering, he repeats the whole fable, word for word, except that the two protagonists exchange roles. At the end, he appended this moral, tongue scarcely moving in cheek:
These two fables are a warning to us not to deal hardly or injuriously by somebody who can defend himself by dealing hardly or injuriously with us. There are many less subtle and imperious creatures which we can eat in peace, and to the Glory of God.
Quite apart from the stories for children, there are several instances of a fable-like use of non-human characters. There are the termites in Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, and in the tragi-comic opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (1972), the hero is confronted with the modern dilemma of survival by the wolf, who runs a factory canning lamb chops. (“God gave me a carnivorous stomach,” the wolf argues, “God must help me fill it.”)
Time and again, we see characters in Themerson’s novels possessed by and then growing out of the consuming ambitions of their time. The accumulated wisdom of these characters in their old age reflects Themerson’s own growing certainty about the relative value of Means and Aims. Dame Victoria, surrounded by young political zealots in The Mystery of the Sardine, says in her dying speech:
I’m so thankful that I don’t understand about Ideas. I’m thankful that when I was a young girl I wasn’t educated to have Ideas.
The subtitle of General Piesc is “The Case of the Forgotten Mission.” When the ageing general is at last in a position to realize his lifelong mission, its reality dissolves and he no longer remembers what it is. Instead, he spends his last days in a tender relationship with a fellow-being (from which union is born Ian Prentice, the prodigious critic of Euclid in The Mystery of the Sardine). And all of this without trace of sentiment. It is another child of General Piesc, the ubiquitous Princess Zuppa, who voices one of the final statements on the theme of decency, towards the end of Hobson’s Island:
Beware of love. Love is cruel, and decency is gentle. Love is ugly and decency is beautiful. Love is easy and decency is difficult. Love creates hate.
“But what does decency create?” she is asked.
Alas Mrs Shepherd, decency creates love, and that’s our human vicious circle.
Stefan Themerson’s writings methodically expose religion, politics, patriotism, power, success, and love as equally unerring paths towards inhuman behavior. Stated so baldly, this seems an unreasonably bleak account of his work, against the grain of his own affirmative openness and belying his wit, humor, and lightness of touch. Nevertheless, the stark events at the conclusion of his last novel appear to hold out little hope for the struggle between Means and Aims. When I told him of my reaction to this tragic finale, he expressed genuine surprise. For him, the same tragedy is present in most of his writing. “It just brings us back to square one,” he said. “It simply reminds us that the choice is ours.”
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Selected Works by Stefan Themerson in English:
The Adventures of Peddy Bottom. Out of Print.
Aesop, the Eagle & the Fox & the Fox & the Eagle. Out of Print.
Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms. Out of Print.
Bayamus and Cardinal Pölätüo. Exact Change, $15.95.
The Chair of Decency. Out of Print.
Collected Poems. Out of Print.
factor T. Out of Print.
General Piesc. Out of Print.
Hobson’s Island. Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95.
Jankel Adler. Out of Print.
Kurt Schwitters in England. Out of Print.
Logic, Labels & Flesh. Out of Print.
Mr. Rouse Builds His House. Out of Print.
The Mystery of the Sardine. Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95.
On Semantic Poetry. Out of Print.
Professor Mmaa’s Lecture. Out of Print.
Semantic Divertissements. Out of Print.
Special Branch. Out of Print.
St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. Out of Print.
Tom Harris. Dalkey Archive Press, $13.50.
The Urge to Create Visions. Out of Print.
Wooff Wooff, or Who Killed Richard Wagner? Out of Print.
